Sean Parker Seeks a New Approach to Charity

Sean Parker has been known for many things over many years, like being a co-founder of Napster, an early Facebook executive and a fun-loving, jet-setting billionaire.

Now he wants to be known for a different role: a distinct kind of philanthropist.

Mr. Parker is embarking on formal introductions of new programs to be financed by his $600 million charitable foundation. He argues that his aim is to swing for the fences on issues that he thinks can be solved.

“It seemed like there was a point where if I was going to do these things, I’d have to make big bets in a concentrated way,” he said in a telephone interview. “That I should do things that were reputationally somewhat weird, or would have some reputational cost.”

Too often, he says, wealthy individuals give money to safe, high-minded causes like education. The charities they set up can donate huge sums that are still conservative, careful to protect their future existence.

Not that Mr. Parker has completely abandoned the technology sector. He is still actively investing in start-ups, and remains on the board of Spotify.

He has also set up Brigade, a start-up made to bolster political engagement through apps that was built, in part, through previously unsuccessful start-ups.

Mr. Parker helped create Napster and later served as Facebook’s first president, a role immortalized by Justin Timberlake in the movie “The Social Network.” It is those roles that have garnered him attention for being regarded as a tech genius. He has also raised eyebrows for his sometimes ostentatious lifestyle, like a lavish fairy-tale wedding in Big Sur, Calif., that Vanity Fair reported cost $4.5 million for the site alone.

Now, he is striving in some ways to follow in the footsteps of many other tech magnates who have poured their wealth into various charitable causes, like Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to New Jersey’s school system.

Nevertheless, Mr. Parker insists that his approach is different, bringing some of the Silicon Valley’s programmer culture to charitable giving. Hackers tend not to tackle problems that they don’t think have solutions.

Sometimes, he said, the answers might be contentious. He mused about whether sending private militias as global peacekeepers would be better than deploying government armies. And he hinted that his malaria eradication efforts might not make friends, arguing that mosquito nets or potential vaccines are ineffective and that old techniques — which he didn’t name — may be more effective.

“I think it’s better to be known for failing than for failing to try,” he said.

Some of the mandates set by the Parker Foundation appear to be modest at first. The first of his $4.5 million malaria grant, which was announced last week and will go to the Malaria Elimination Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, will pay for research into pest control.

But Mr. Parker has also dedicated significant attention and money toward immunotherapy, in which the immune system is used to battle cancer. He has long had an interest in the field, rooted in the illnesses of various family members, and has even helped assemble an international “dream team” of specialists to continue research into novel therapies.

The polar opposite approach, according to Mr. Parker, is what he calls the incrementalism of the traditional donor model. Entrepreneurs who have amassed wealth over the years lose their risk-taking edge, and when it comes time to give away money, they look to maintain respectability and membership in the establishment.

“It feels like when you’re dealing with people who try to name buildings after themselves or end world hunger, they’re not really making an impact,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tech Billionaire Seeks a New Approach to Charity . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe